mychai's Diaryland Diary

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"Oh, woe to me!"

Oh, the worst fate of Diaryland fates has been bestowed upon me!

I've seen many a humble and brave diary here at Diaryland crumble and fall when their author met with the same destiny. I knew it was bound to happen some day. In fact, I've even toyed with the idea off and on to inflict the fate upon myself, but the little voice inside of me that quickly stops me from doing other terrible things like "jumping off of a cliff" and "joining the Marines" also quickly stopped me from doing this.

But it happened naturally. Unexpectedly.

Would you like know what happened?

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My dad found out about my diary...

Yes, yes, I know! Oh, the humanity!!

But I don't even know if he read much. And frankly, I don't think I would mind if he did. He'd have to just glaze over the four-letter words. But I don't think he'd mind that too much.

Wouldya Pops? Dad? Hellloooooo?

So, yeah. It was a sad day in JP-Land with Mr. Rogers dying. But, as always, I have a pretty neat story that only has very little to do with Mr. Rogers.

As many of you know, I used to be in the Boy Scouts. I started as a little kid and pretty much stayed in it as long as I possibly could. The cut-off age of Boy Scouts is, obviously, eighteen. I stayed in until sixteen because I had a boarding school to go to.

Anyway, I made my way through the ranks and eventually got to the rank of Eagle Scout -- the highest rank possible in Boy Scouts. It'll probably rank as one of the best things I've ever done. Adding that to a r�sum� is a definite plus.

After receiving my Eagle, a lot of things went on that I never realized. Pictures, interviews, celebrations, etc. One was an Eagle Scout banquet where all of the Eagle Scouts in the area got to come together and have dinner with someone from the job field they were most interested in.

I didn't really have a good job field in mind at the time, me being too young and all. I was fifteen or sixteen, and my best guess was something in the "astronaut" field.

Big dork, remember?

Since they couldn't get some all-important astronaut to fly to South Mississippi and have dinner with some geeky fifteen year-old Boy Scout, they did the next best thing for me. They got the head of some kind of space/astronaut related program at nearby Stennis Space Center to come and eat dinner with me.

He was a nice enough guy. He answered all of my questions. He laughed at my jokes. And he told me everything you tell a fifteen year-old to keep his eyes glazed over with dreams and ambitions. I'm sure he didn't want to spend one of his free nights eating dinner with some random kid, but I'm glad he did.

Wanna know what he name was? Do ya, do ya?

Fred Rogers.

It wasn't Mr. Rogers. It was Dr. Rogers. And he looked nothing like the "real thing." In fact, he was about to retire and surely get the hell out of South Mississippi.

But who else do you know can say that they had dinner with one Fred Rogers?

My living room is pretty much packed. I have to load up my cook books and my chess sets (I have two marble ones and one "Civil War" chess set), take down my wall hangings, and I'll be done with that.

I went through a little wooden box last night that I keep on my book shelf. I keep little momentos of things I do in that box -- things like receipts, notes people have written me, cigar rings, ticket stubs... things like that.

It was a nice trip down memory lane. Especially when I came across a bunch of pictures I had forgotten about from when I worked at the one-hour photo processing place.

I won't say who the pictures were of. Mostly because I have no clue who these people were. But I will say this: We were the only place in town that processed pictures of naked people. And we always "quality controlled" the prints coming out. That is, if a print was too dark, too red, or over exposed -- or if the subject of the print had an especially nice rack -- we could do a few things and re-process it, making it a good picture.

We usually threw away the bad prints.

But yours truly knew how to tuck some of the naked pictures away so nobody knew I had them. If I would have been discovered, being fired would have been the least of my troubles!

So, Dad... I used to steal pictures of naked people from my work place. I hope you still love me!

Remind me to tell you later how we can pull up unscrambled porn off of the satellites at work. That makes Saturday shifts go by real quick.

Well, that's it for me for today. Sorry I don't have anything overly exciting to give you guys.

I'm packing. I'm eating.

That's. About. It.

I will leave you with this little quote from a Mr. Rogers song. Hopefully it will warm your day and make you feel loved. May we all strive to be like Mr. Rogers.

You are my friend,
You are special!
You are my friend,
You're special to me!
You are the only one like you.
Like you, my friend, I like you.

11:28 a.m. - Fri., Feb. 28, 2003

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